Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
fifteen minutes the stove was out and she was serving herself fresh
hot vegetable curry with warm chappatis, sliced mango, pickles, and
yoghurt. The size of her prodigious lap came in handy. Nestled in
the folds of her sari, every container had its place, and she seemed
no less comfortable on a moving bus than if she were sitting at a
restaurant table.
Then she spooned a selection of this ingenious meal onto a
chappati and offered it to me. She fed the little old man, too, and we
all munched away hungrily. Hoping she'd not understood a word
I'd said during her cooking, I fished out some bananas I'd bought in
Bangalore and divided them among us. All of a sudden, three
strangers had become three friends having a picnic.
All deeds are traps, except ritual deeds. Hence the need for selfless
action.
-
Bhagavad Gita
We pulled in to Tiruvannamalai just after nightfall. Even the long,
cramped, bone-battering ride seemed to pass quickly. I think I
actually managed a nap as well, head pillowed on my elbow, cooled
by that illusion of wind the speeding bus created as it sped, hooting,
through the brutal summer day.
Some three hundred kilometres south-east of Bangalore,
Tiruvannamalai rests on the edge of the Javadi Hills in the heart of
Tamil Nadu state. It's an ancient realm, heart of popular Hinduism's
dramatic evolution into its contemporary polytheistic forms; seat
too of once-mighty empires, birthplace of great cultures that
flourished when Europe was a nasty, brutish wasteland. It is also the
site of countless bloody battles, the territorial line drawn and held
against many would-be invaders. In the South there still linger
faint glimpses of ancient India, that lush, rich, fabled land that drew
the invading Aryans to it three millennia ago to live like the
Dravidian inhabitants they found there.
Like
them, but not
with
them. The caste system these Aryans devised was, as its Sanskrit
name shows, a colour bar with them on one side and the small,
dark-skinned peoples they had conquered on the other.
Traces of that earthly paradise remain: an ordered society free of
